Dr. Don Wood explains why your nervous system still reacts to old trauma. Emotions don't know time, he says. They're action-calls triggered when your brain matches present cues to old data. Healing means letting stored emotional energy move through your body so your nervous system can finally deactivate.
Chapters
The way I describe it is the purpose of an emotion is a call for an action. Your mind is trying to get you into an action. The purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. However, if you're angry, but you're in a situation that anger doesn't make any sense, I call it a glitch. Your mind is looking at old data in real time. That's the trauma and is trying to fix it. It wants you to do something, fight back, run away. Right. So when people talk about something that happened to them 20 years ago, then their heart's pounding in their chest, I say that doesn't make sense. Your mind is thinking you can do something about it. You should be able to run now, but you can't run. Resolve it.
Yes. Because if you start with the first, what I call the first, the three elements are in no particular order, but our thoughts are only in the present moment. So our thoughts have to stream like music. Music. You can look at a sheet of music, but it's not the same as listening to it. So we can observe in the present moment in a flash, in a snapshot of time. But we can't think in a snapshot of time. So our mind is never in the present moment. And our emotions have to come through our body, and our body is only in the present moment. So as long as we're thinking, we are just automatically avoiding feeling our body. And we can't sense our body, we can't feel our emotions. And so our mind does everything it can to be in control. And it's a disruption. When you have that glitch in the system, we have an emotional response, and every emotion is valid. It's a guidance system. Not in the way other people say guidance system. It's an instantaneous guidance system to move towards something that's good or away from trouble. It's a valid emotion. And so if we're able to allow it to work, we work through it. And there's no glitch, there's no disruption. Then it moves through it. It's like gasoline. You burn it and it's gone. But you could store gasoline for 20 years and it'll still burn, and it'll still be a reminder of something we need to heal. And that's the way emotions are. They don't know time. And the glitch is the emotion is real. But my mind says, I don't have time for this. I'm going to be judged, whatever it might be. So. So we just Clamp down and shut that off and store it for later. But we forget later is here now and it's time to heal this.
Yeah, and I sort of have a similar approach, but mine is a little bit different than the fact that I say the emotion is a response to the mind looking at old data. So if somebody says to you, for example, there's a smell, right, and you smell that, your mind literally does a Google search. What do we know about that smell? And then when it pulls up the old data from 20 years ago where somebody was in a fight with you or hurt you or attacked you, and that smell is connected to it, your mind then pulls in the old data and says, oh, we're in danger. And so it then creates the emotion to get you into an action.
Can I reply to that?
Sure, yeah.
So the emotion we feel today, that's caused by our remembrance of the situation and the emotions from the past is valid because we're getting a signal something's happening, I need to be aware of and avoid. And that's a valid present moment emotion. But it could be in response to either a healed or more likely an unhealed emotion from the distant past. So we smell this and sense this thing today that we have a reason, a logical reason to fear. And we have a present day emotion. And at the same time underneath that, where I think the real gift is, is that past emotional wound that we've stored in our being that knows no time whatsoever. And we'll re experience it today the same as we experienced it originally. So we have now two issues going on. We have the present day emotion of the response that says avoid this, which is a gift in real time now. And we also have the gift of the past emotional trauma that we can heal. And so all these things are happening and people say, nope, I'm not going to feel. But it's such a gift to be able to understand and navigate our life when we do have these emotions.
Well, a lot of people just don't know where they're coming from. So I think we're very sort of closest to what we're saying is the same thing. I just sort of say that the emotion is more a response to what you're perceiving as happening now. But it thinks old trauma is real and so it creates the emotion to get you into an action to protect you. But it's a glitch because it's looking at old data, not current data.
I agree with that. It is a response today that is valid. But if emotions don't know time and we didn't burn the gasoline, so to speak. That energy that we're holding from the old emotional wound, then that emotion that seems like it's real today is because the emotion doesn't know the difference between today and the past. And emotions go back to. From my understanding, they go back to the instinctual brain. Before we really had our thought capacity evolved, then everything was emotional, all the responses were emotional. And as our brain evolved, we didn't let go of that emotional response system and. But we never understood it along the way either.
And the problem is, as long as that is unresolved, it's going to continue to act. What I call activate the nervous system. I never liked the word trigger. So when people say that triggered me, I said your body's not. Your body and mind are not negative and violent. Right? It's protecting you.
I use the word reactivate, so I agree with you 100%. It's reactivating what's already in there.
And I say it just. It's activating your nervous system because it's trying to get you into a response to protect yourself about something that doesn't exist. That's what I call it.
I agree with that. I agree with that. And I believe that the reason God does that through the law of attraction is God wants us to feel love. God wants us to feel good. And if we're hanging on to that energy of the old emotional experiences, God wants that gone from our being. And the only way that we can release that, in my opinion and my experience, the only way we can release that is to go back and reactivate and re experience those emotions we didn't feel completely during the time of our original wound. And God wants us to let that go.
Well, God designed us to heal exactly our body and our minds to heal. All we have to do is get the mind to reprocess what it needed to resolve.
